Valuetainment - “The CIA Had To Fund Us” - Palantir Co-Founder BREAKS DOWN Controversial In-Q-Tel Funding

00:00:00.000 You were at Palantir 04209, we were also at PayPal, and they categorized you as being part of the PayPal Mafia, second, you know...

00:00:09.220 I'm 15 years younger than Peter, I'm 12 years younger than Elon, I was a junior kid, I don't get any credit for PayPal.

00:00:14.180 Well, you were still there, you were still...

00:00:15.500 I was there learning, I was learning from these guys.

00:00:16.940 And were you in meetings, were you watching them, were you there, and what was that like?

00:00:19.940 What was Elon like in meetings, what was Peter like in meetings, what was that like?

00:00:23.440 Give us some of the insight.

00:00:24.220 I mean, I usually was in meetings with Elon, to be honest, but these guys were very opinionated, very interested, very ambitious, very fast.

00:00:33.680 No tolerance for things that are broken, you fix it right away, you work through the problems, you get everything done today, you don't talk about what you're going to do next week, you just move.

00:00:42.400 People would be there late at night fixing problems, passionate about their work.

00:00:46.420 What was the demo of the age?

00:00:49.200 What would you say the average is, would you say 25, 28?

00:00:51.780 These are a bunch of guys in their 20s mostly.

00:00:53.600 In their 20s, where you can be demanding of getting them to...

00:00:58.020 Now, at the same time, was Elon and Peter also there driving, working with them?

00:01:01.740 Yeah, in different contexts, right?

00:01:03.180 Peter's more of the strategist, the philosopher, the thinker.

00:01:06.840 He's not the one, he's not the technical guy himself.

00:01:09.340 I think Elon is more of the operator.

00:01:11.680 He's more there in the room.

00:01:12.720 I mean, I was in Palo Alto a couple weeks ago, right?

00:01:16.060 And I was meeting a friend, and Elon was in the back doing engineering reviews at XAI.

00:01:20.120 He's just there working, working, working.

00:01:21.740 He's kind of more of the workhorse, just push through, solve the details of the technical problems.

00:01:25.880 Was the level of intent, like who was the most intense guy at Apple, the most intense?

00:01:32.820 I mean, I think Elon's always been one of the very most intense people I've ever seen in terms of working.

00:01:37.000 But there's other engineers who are just there all the time pushing hard, right?

00:01:40.540 I think when you're in operation mode, guys like Max Leipzig and others were just, as far as I could tell, just always working.

00:01:45.400 Who were some of the guys that you worked with that were maybe junior guys like you that came out and became big stars as well?

00:01:51.780 Yeah, so, I mean, a lot of the guys who were there, there were 16 different companies that were started after PayPal that quickly became billion-dollar companies, right?

00:01:58.860 So, and a lot of these guys were older than me, but it was the guys, you know, Chad and Steve who built YouTube.

00:02:03.380 It was Reid Hoffman who built LinkedIn.

00:02:05.120 It was obviously Elon did Tesla and SpaceX.

00:02:07.620 I mean, you know, there's guys who built Ironport.

00:02:10.140 There's just, there's so many things that came out of there.

00:02:12.000 Got it.

00:02:12.540 And so, from there, how did the opportunity to be a co-founder of Palantir come up?

00:02:17.820 Well, I was working with Peter at his hedge fund, and I was, you know, the hedge fund was a little bit disorganized, and I started bringing in my smartest friends to help, and there weren't really other managers there, so I'd help start building things.

00:02:29.760 And a bunch of my smartest friends I brought in one summer to help us, they weren't interested in finance.

00:02:34.460 They thought it was boring.

00:02:35.300 And so, and Peter and I had been talking a lot about, you know, at PayPal, we had to stop the Chinese and Russian mafia from stealing all of our money. 0.91

00:02:42.580 And so, we got to know all the guys who were helping us arrest the bad guys.

00:02:45.600 There was a secret service in the FBI, and right after this happened, it was 9-11.

00:02:49.960 And so, these guys were spending billions of dollars on stuff that we thought didn't make any sense.

00:02:53.640 And they were really, they kept asking us for advice.

00:02:55.380 They were confused about how to do things.

00:02:56.440 Who's they?

00:02:57.160 It was, I mean, President Bush created what was called the Department of Homeland Security at the time.

00:03:02.660 I shouldn't be too mean about it, but you know how it works in government is that when you create a new department, people can't really fire people in government easily.

00:03:09.860 So, sometimes they'll have a lot of people they wanted to fire, and then instead they just pushed them into the new department.

00:03:13.540 So, it was a bit of a mess.

00:03:14.700 Got it.

00:03:14.880 If I'm totally honest.

00:03:15.600 A new department is clear, send your fire.

00:03:17.140 So, therefore, the whole department didn't really know very well what it was doing at first, was my impression.

00:03:22.460 And they were spending money on just nonsense stuff.

00:03:24.620 And it became really obvious to us that Silicon Valley, Google, PayPal, all these things that were going on out there were just way ahead, technically, of where the government was at that point.

00:03:32.880 And this was a problem because the government was using all, the government was spending $38 billion a year gathering data, looking at the data, failing to stop the terrorists, but also abusing our civil liberties.

00:03:42.380 So, it was a mess.

00:03:43.080 So, we said, you know what, there's actually a really important problem here to solve.

00:03:46.800 A, I'd like to stop the bad guys from attacking us again and go get them instead.

00:03:49.720 Instead, B, I don't want everyone in the government seeing all of my data without any controls.

00:03:53.440 That's crazy.

00:03:53.940 Got PC Optimum points?

00:03:56.360 Visit Shoppers Drug Mart for the bonus redemption event and get more for your points.

00:04:00.180 Friday, March 6th to Wednesday, March 11th.

00:04:02.240 Valid in-store and online.

00:04:07.260 Investing is all about the future.

00:04:09.240 So, what do you think is going to happen?

00:04:11.240 Bitcoin is sort of inevitable at this point.

00:04:13.760 I think it would come down to precious metals.

00:04:16.340 I hope we don't go cashless.

00:04:17.440 I would say land is a safe investment.

00:04:21.120 Technology, companies.

00:04:22.160 Solar energy.

00:04:23.260 Robotic pollinators might be a thing. 1.00

00:04:25.760 A wrestler to face a robot.

00:04:27.460 That will have to happen.

00:04:29.100 So, whatever you think is going to happen in the future, you can invest in it at Wealthsimple.

00:04:34.800 Start now at Wealthsimple.com.

00:04:36.860 So, that's when you said, why don't we go do it?

00:04:40.140 You guys said, let's go do it ourselves.

00:04:41.580 And I started having my friends.

00:04:42.700 I brought that summer to help build a prototype, which sounds even crazier than finance, but at least it was interesting.

00:04:47.600 They enjoyed helping me build it.

00:04:49.080 And my roommate, who I'm actually seeing later, he moved down here to Miami.

00:04:52.480 He and I controlled the team and Stephan Cohen, my co-founder.

00:04:56.080 And we started building it up.

00:04:57.600 And CIA was apparently one of the first investors in the company.

00:05:01.260 They eventually gave us money.

00:05:02.680 I think it was the second or third round.

00:05:04.320 But it was only $2 million, and we actually bought them back.

00:05:07.340 The reason we needed them is that Peter, basically no one would give us money.

00:05:11.820 First of all, Alex Carpenter went all over Sand Hill Road.

00:05:14.040 Like, you guys have all this talent, because they can measure talent even back then.

00:05:16.900 Like, why aren't you doing social media?

00:05:18.160 Why aren't you doing something new and exciting?

00:05:19.900 Working with the government's crazy.

00:05:21.060 What's wrong with you guys?

00:05:21.940 It's not possible.

00:05:22.840 So, he didn't think it was a good idea.

00:05:24.440 No, no.

00:05:24.900 This is Alex and I talking to the investors.

00:05:26.500 So, all the investors were basically telling us.

00:05:27.740 They were telling you guys. 1.00

00:05:28.520 They're telling us, you guys are crazy. 1.00

00:05:29.800 Right. 0.89

00:05:30.200 No one does this.

00:05:31.020 Why are you doing this?

00:05:31.660 It's not possible.

00:05:32.800 It doesn't make any sense.

00:05:34.060 These are some big names, credible names.

00:05:35.380 These are the big names.

00:05:37.000 These are, we got turned down by everyone.

00:05:38.780 I got turned down by Excel, by Sequoia.

00:05:40.480 The guy at Kleiner Perkins at the time, and they're a great firm.

00:05:42.980 I admire them very much.

00:05:43.800 But the guy at the time who's no longer there, he started laughing at us on the phone,

00:05:47.040 because Alex didn't have a technical degree.

00:05:48.420 He's like, you guys don't even know what you're doing.

00:05:49.700 And it's a doctorate, but it's not even a relevant doctorate.

00:05:52.460 Like, he's laughing us out of the room, basically.

00:05:54.820 And what is Alex's mindset like when he's walking out of the room?

00:05:57.600 What's he telling you?

00:05:58.720 Because Alex, he's a very unique type of guy himself.

00:06:01.700 We were not happy with these people.

00:06:04.240 Peter Thiel told me it was probably really good for me, because it gave me an even bigger

00:06:07.300 chip on my shoulder to make sure we succeeded after being mocked and turned down by like

00:06:11.100 30 of these guys.

00:06:12.300 And Peter couldn't just only fund it himself.

00:06:14.440 He needed other people to fund these things.

00:06:15.900 So when we got In-Q-Tel, which is the CIA's venture capital arm at the time, to give us

00:06:19.640 a little bit of money, and Peter gave us even more, that was really critical.

00:06:22.260 And then how long later did you guys pay the $2 million back?

00:06:25.320 I think we bought it for a much higher amount.

00:06:27.420 We had some option.

00:06:28.140 I forget.

00:06:28.480 It must have been five or six years later.

00:06:29.700 Okay.

00:06:30.080 So they still made some money on it.

00:06:31.380 Oh, they made plenty of money on it.

00:06:33.000 And more importantly, we saved the government billions of dollars versus what they were doing.

00:06:38.820 I mean, you literally have things going on.

00:06:40.220 The DHS guys, I remember there was some Unisys thing where it was like $3 billion to integrate

00:06:44.940 all the data.

00:06:45.960 And we came and we showed them we could have done the same thing for them out of the box

00:06:48.580 in a month.

00:06:49.220 Like, don't waste billions of dollars.

00:06:50.580 So it turns out confidence saves the government lots of money and protects civil liberties.

00:06:54.040 People don't realize it's both of those things.

00:06:55.320 What is the desire to constantly use names that are from, I believe, Lord of the Rings,

00:07:01.040 right?

00:07:01.280 What does that come from?

00:07:02.660 Peter gets credit for naming.

00:07:04.080 Peter gets credit.

00:07:04.980 You know, but I'm a fan of it.

00:07:05.940 I think, listen, and we wrote about this at the time.

00:07:08.560 So at the time when we're creating this, we say, this is a dangerous thing to create.

00:07:12.420 You know, but we believe it's a worthy thing to create.

00:07:15.800 And it took a lot of courage.

00:07:17.260 Like, you know, there's a lot of different things we could have worked on.

00:07:19.660 We could have made a lot of money doing a lot of other things.

00:07:21.360 But it was really important to both help.

00:07:25.300 You know, we have to eliminate probably about up to 10,000 terrorists that might not have

00:07:28.900 got eliminated.

00:07:29.520 We worked with all sorts of amazing groups in the government alongside them with the

00:07:33.060 technology and with the ability.

00:07:34.540 And we help protect civil liberties and make sure the government watchers are being watched.

00:07:39.000 Now, you know, of course, you create this technology.

00:07:42.560 If it gets into the wrong hands and they turn off the audit trails, who knows what bad could

00:07:45.920 be done with it?

00:07:46.420 So there's good and bad here.

00:07:47.720 Yeah.

00:07:47.880 So and we'll get in.

00:07:49.080 I want to get into that as well.

00:07:49.960 But going back to the meetings of going meeting with investors and them saying, you know what?

00:07:54.580 You know, you guys don't know what you're doing.

00:07:55.980 You don't even have the real degree.

00:07:57.160 Alex said in one of the interviews, I think he may have said it to you.

00:08:00.160 He said, I wish we would have told them to F off and just laugh.

00:08:03.480 So boy, we were so polite.

00:08:04.760 They would have probably respected us more if we if we had just like, were you naturally

00:08:08.400 polite or were you intentionally becoming polite because you needed the money?

00:08:11.580 You're supposed to do any of the money, man.

00:08:13.200 I know you're supposed to got it. 0.74

00:08:14.380 So but but it's it wasn't naturally because you're a disagreeable person.

00:08:17.740 Well, yeah, at the same time, I think both of us are not the kind of people.

00:08:22.040 We're probably a little more arrogant now that now we've been more arrogant.

00:08:25.500 We didn't you know, we didn't know that we didn't know for sure we knew what we were

00:08:28.600 doing.

00:08:28.880 We felt we were doing something smart, but it was our first time.

00:08:31.260 He said he said, I think it was I wish we were more arrogant in certain areas and less

00:08:36.280 arrogant in certain areas.

00:08:37.580 That's that's well said.

00:08:38.960 You know, it's interesting when you're creating our company.

00:08:41.220 We kind of reinvented a lot of things from scratch.

00:08:44.280 And in some cases, it was probably, frankly, genius.

00:08:46.680 In other cases, we could have just hired someone who knew what they were doing.

00:08:48.940 And it's like when you're building a company, I talk about having adults in the room.

00:08:52.440 There's certain types of adults you don't want to bring into a startup because you don't

00:08:55.100 want people running a machine in a standard way.

00:08:56.780 You want to be creative.

00:08:57.620 But there's certain parts that once you get there, you probably do want the adults to

00:09:00.300 show you how it's done.

00:09:01.080 And so there's there's some things we maybe could have learned from others.

00:09:03.240 When we set out to create a shoe that blends comfort, function and luxury, we had the choice

00:09:09.680 to make it fast.

00:09:11.120 We had the choice to make it cheap.

00:09:13.060 We chose neither.

00:09:14.720 Instead, we chose Tuscaneiro.

00:09:17.020 We chose true Italian craftsmanship.

00:09:19.620 Each pair touched by 50 skilled hands.

00:09:22.480 We chose patience, spending two years perfecting every detail.

00:09:25.960 And we chose the finest quality at every step.

00:09:29.260 Introducing the Future Looks Bright collection.

00:09:33.600 Not rushed, not disposable, not ordinary.

00:09:37.860 Rather intentional, luxurious, timeless.

00:09:47.160 If you enjoyed this video, you want to watch more videos like this, click here.

00:09:50.200 And if you want to watch the entire podcast, click here.

Valuetainment - March 03, 2026

“The CIA Had To Fund Us” - Palantir Co-Founder BREAKS DOWN Controversial In-Q-Tel Funding

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript